If you’ve not heard of the openlibrary.org initiative, the idea is “one web pagefor every book ever published.”

A pretty noble undertaking….Anyhow, news is that have now have a total of 13.4 million books,with about 18 million more records to go.Of course quantity and quality are not the same. ;-DAs for where these records are coming from, they have startedmerging library records with other book data (vendor data?)

Excerpt:OCLC and Google Inc. have signed an agreement to exchange data that will facilitate the discovery of library collections through Google search services.

Under terms of the agreement, OCLC member libraries participating in the Google Book Search™ program, which makes the full text of more than one million books searchable, may share their WorldCat-derived MARC records with Google to better facilitate discovery of library collections through Google.

Google will link from Google Book Search to WorldCat.org, which will drive traffic to library OPACs and other library services. Google will share data and links to digitized books with OCLC, which will make it possible for OCLC to represent the digitized collections of OCLC member libraries in WorldCat.

Kind of old news at this point, but it has been floating around in my inbox.

/begin—The Library of Congress is pleased to announce “LCCN Permalink” — a new persistent URL service for creating links to bibliographic records in the Library of Congress Online Catalog using the Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN).

LCCN Permalink is a convenient way to cite items from the Library’s collection in your bibliographies, reference guides, emails, blogs, databases, web pages, etc. Not only can you easily construct a permalink yourself, but we also display them as part of the bibliographic record in the LC Online Catalog (http://catalog.loc.gov/).

An LCCN Permalink retrieves a MARCXML-formatted bibliographic record using the Z39.50/SRU protocol. Both valid and cancelled LCCNs (MARC 21 fields 010a and 010z) are searched. LCCN Permalink displays are based on the Full Record display in the LC Online Catalog. Not only can you link directly into the LC Online Catalog, but you can also view the record in MARCXML, MODS, and Dublin Core formats.

As a person who uses LCSH, I completely understand some of the frustrations in wrangling with it. Although LCSH is dynamic with revisions and updates, in all honesty, I think it is generally slow to change, is hard to maintain, and is not easy to use. It also seems to be rather hard for libraries and others who use LCSH to easily implement headings changes in an automated way, without considerable manpower and oversight. Perhaps, that is a problem with both the automated systems used in libraries and also with LCSH, as alluded to in the article.

Anyhow, I found this article interesting and thoughtful.

Facet-based search and navigation interfaces are becoming increasingly popular on commercial websites, and several facet-based interfaces for library catalogs are now available. Many of these interfaces attempt to provide Web-style faceted interfaces to Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in order to provide options for browsing and for navigating large result sets.